[pron]

Multi-app servers usually take much longer to launch, deploying apps and upgrading the servers is a pain, and there's a host of other issues (like not being able to easily allocate resources to apps according to their needs).

> As far as I can tell, it comes down who cares more about the settings for the server

There's a lot of truth to that. I think that the whole devops approach is that they should be the same people. Of course, you might have valid reasons for not subscribing to that approach.

[eeperson]

The difficulties you mention (aside from upgrading servers) is about the having multiple apps in a single server not standalone vs embedded. Although, if you are careful, it can actually be faster and easier to deploy to a multi-app server [0].

I grant you, upgrading servers can be more involved depending on how you do it.

[0] - http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/deployer-howto.html#...